A capacity of current layout of a post office (PO) facility and a commercial mailbox facility is limited by a number of units that can be set up from a customer-facing wall. There are a lot of extra spaces, inside the facility, behind the customer-facing wall that can be constructed into storage areas. However, for the current system, the inside storage areas are not useful for storage because it is not directly connected to the customer-facing wall. Therefore, it is not easily accessed by the outside customers. PO boxes and commercial mailboxes become more and more popular as the pickup locations for e-commerce delivery. However, irregular sizes of e-commerce orders have been the challenge for a method using PO boxes and commercial mailboxes as the pickup locations because a respective size of an e-commerce order is usually fixed for each subscriber. Customers who rent small mailboxes have constrains to receive larger items. Postal offices have also installed some stand-alone lockers with large-size units to store and retrieve bulky packages. Those large-size lockers may not be efficient for a facility with space limitations. Many traditional brick-n-mortar stores, such as Wal-Mart and Target, have started “click and pickup” service to support in-store pickup for online orders. The setup for customers to pick up their online orders in the local stores is convenient for the customers. However, it is costly and is limited by the inefficiency of manual operations of order retrievals.
New technologies, such as cellphone app and security coded entry, have made it easier to open a locker box and to get items from a smart locker. Robot can help to build up automated operations to connect a locker in the front to a rack in the back for receiving and retrieving. A new automated-storage-and-retrieval-system (ASRS) for smaller packages in parcels and mails is designed to separate storage from access points. The ASRS automatically connects limited customer-access points in the front to large storage areas in the back of a facility.